Teaching young women to speak publicly in NJ

She's a former miss New Jersey, a standup comedian and writer/performer of her 'One Funny Mother' theater show. If there's anyone who knows about public speaking, it's Dena Blizzard and now she's trying to help young women better themselves with this fine craft.

“You know my daughters are now teenagers and we actually started a non-profit on our own called 'ladies out loud,' and it has nothing to do with pageantry. It's all about teaching young women how to speak, how to be better speakers but through the Arts."

Blizzard, who has done plenty of public speaking, was surprised. She said, "I'm just finding that I'm the only woman on the main stage and I keep looking around like where are all the other women?" Dena's comedy has helped tremendously with her public speaking skills. "I think that just by the necessity of talking and being a comedian, you learn how to be a better speaker, but. there are not opportunities for young women to learn it and my husband is like ‘well teach a class,’ I'm like I could teach a class but if I just start teaching adults in  20 years what changes? Nothing, because we're not teaching young women, we're not giving them these platforms and so we started this program it’s 7 weeks long if you want to learn about it it's ladiesoutloud.org."

"They're basically gonna start as chapters and there's 12 girls in each chapter at 7 weeks long, and they learn how to speak but through so they can pick a spoken word or poetry or acting or tell their own story."

Dena's class is much more interactive. She said, "The worst possible way to teach public speaking is in a public speaking class with a piece of paper that you have no interest in. You spend the whole semester giving one speech and you give it one time" as compared to comedy. "How many times as a comedian do you say the same thing over and over and over, because that’s just how you say it."

This goes back to Blizzards Mid 20's, "It's just what I going back to Miss America, what I think is so amazing about it, is at 22 years old I was traveling the state of New Jersey and just talking and learning how to be a really good speaker, and then that led me to stand up. You know when I first started people are like, 'you're not that funny but you can talk.'"

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